I sometimes see a reference to a poster from the past and wonder what happened to them. Is it like gradeschool or highschool where they moved away and you just didn't know at the time? Did they just sorta grow up and out of the silliness of Topix and move on to bigger, better and more tangible things than posting on the internet?
Maybe. I think many died quietly in their sleep though. Well, someone's sleep.
Many of us refer to the people on the threads as "imaginary people" even those which we know exist in real life. For most of us, real life gets in the way of getting together with people who tend to be several states or even an ocean away.
Some people, however, are so imaginary as to actually be imaginary.
Huh what, Ferrerman?
I'm quite certain that some of the most notorious, nefarious, jerk-faced, assholes on the threads don't actually darken any doors in real life. They are figments of someone's imagination, of an actual person somewhere in America for sure, but, not actual people themselves.
Angelique770 used such posters to rally the troops, get the settelers to circle the wagons. Before Ferrerman, there had to be boogeymen to attack and strawmen and straw-women to help defend. This is pretty old school stuff. It goes on every day in politics, why not in a virtual community? Frankly, it spices things up, makes the threads more interesting and keeps them from all being "Hello! How are you? I'm fine!" all the fucking time.
You gotta have conflict. If there is no conflict, make some up!
It's kinda funny that people spend time and bandwidth hating characters but, before there was the internet, we had books for this purpose. Nasty, violent characters are far more interesting than members of the upright citizens brigade. Most any actor would rather play the antagonist than the protagonist who has to play by the rules. Blend the two and the protagonist becomes that much more interesting.
On the threads, nasty people die off like a soap opera. Sometimes they return like evil twins. (Ferrerman note: Just like the movies, black characters get killed in the first scene. There are no good roles for Blacks on Topix! Well, maybe in the African-American threads. But, I don't know because I'm afraid to go there!)
But, just like the soaps, the reason these people die off is often because they got written out of the script. Someone might have gotten bored with them or simply wanted to create a new character or more interesting conflict. There are some desperately lonely people out there. What they might be lacking in real life, they can have on the net. I don't think these people are necessarily creative. How hard is it to be a disagreeable asshole, over and over again? Personally, I don't know. Despite the number of fucktard rethuglicans who will tell you different, I'm really only an asshole to assholes. I bully the bullies. Everybody else gets the dick jokes and spankings. I'm quite comfortable in my posting skin doing any of those things.
But, enough about me. I'm as certain as I can be in a mixed-up, jumbled-up, virtual world that certain famous trolls are figments of certain people's imaginations. I base this on necessity being the mother of invention and idle hands being the Devil's work shop. It's comical and rather sad but, some of the most hated people on the threads do not exist. You may get a PM from them but you are really talking to their creator, helping perhaps, to formulate a new plot line. I know this because I regularly get PM's from some of these people. I'm sure the creator giggles in delight when I respond, never minding that I reveal no information. Well, nothing that I didn't want to reveal anyway.... Though since I drove a herd of cattle and several semi-trucks through A770's stories a few years back, I pretty much let a lot of this conspiracy stuff slide until I started getting barraged by PM's from a particular poster. This guy was always getting banned. There was never a good reason why he was getting banned. People from the clique fought with him but, I never saw him violate the Terms Of Service. Yet he kept getting *banned*, killed off by Topix and having to create new avatars practically every week. This raised a big, red flag. This person wasn't so much pumping for information as he was feeding me information. Most of it was stupid too. The idea was to direct me, this way and that. It got old real quick. Annoying.
It caused me, though, to again look in other directions. Liars always slip up. They seem to want to be caught. One of the persons responsible for all this chicanery clearly uses a proxy server. about a month ago I noticed that he was trolling his adversary *from* his enemy's fictitious hometown.
Well now, the plot thins instead of thickens. A little bit of showing off, showed the hand instead.
You gotta be careful who you *meet* on the internet. That's Internet 101. But, you gotta be careful too about who you hate as well. You could realistically be wasting time hating someone who exists solely in the dark heart of someone else. Over the past few months I've seen this person trolling others, usually for having pro-Ferrerman sympathies. It's easy for me to spot these things because when you have someone who has dedicated their life to having you as an enemy, you tend to pick up a few things about them. You just have to pay a little attention because freaks like that are paying a lot of attention to you.
"Keep your posting friends close and torment your enemies", I always say. And don't trust ANY new avatars as far as you can throw them. Sage advice from an actual Ferrerman.
